The New York Times Book Review praised the characters in Jon Hassler's last
novel, Dear James, as "so exquisitely rendered that even first-time visitor
to Staggerford will come to love them as old friends." Now, in Rookery
Blues, Hassler once again brings to life an oddball group of Midwesterners as
they brace themselves and each other for the turmoil of the late 1960s on a
small college campus.

Rookery, Minnesota, is about as far north as you can go and still be in the
United States, and Rookery State College is an academic backwater if ever there
was one. The campus is populated by students seeking draft deferments during the
height of the Vietnam War and misfit teachers who can't get a job anywhere else.
Even so, some of the faculty at Rookery State long for a meeting of the minds,
the companionship of soulmates.

And then, one frigid afternoon, the Icejam Quintet is born in the improbable
basement apartment of Neil Novotny, an unkempt English instructor and obsessed
novelist. With Leland Edwards on piano, Neil on clarinet, Victor Dash on drums,
and Connor on bass, the group comes together with the help of its muse, the
lovely Peggy Benoit, who plays saxophone and sings. The most gifted and spirited
of the bunch, Peggy instills the harmony that allows the Icejammers to produce
the kind of jazz they've all dreamed of playing, bringing them satisfaction they
never thought they'd experience.

But even isolated Rookery State will be touched by the great discontent sweeping
the country. News of a salary freeze electrifies the rabble-rousing Victor, and
the first labor union in history comes noisily to campus. As a teachers' strike
takes shape, threatening both the draft-dodging students and the complacent
administration, the five musicians must struggle with their loyalties to the
school, the town, their families, and each other....

As he does in all his novels, Jon Hassler infuses the story of this unlikely
collection of eccentrics with wry wit, deep feeling, and ultimately, his faith
in human beings to endure despite their own sadly comic foibles. Like his
beloved Staggerford novels, Rookery Blues is about the sheer need for community
that everyone harbors--even in the unlikeliest places.

Page One

"Before they became the Icejam they were three men setting out on a
fishing trip in an old convertible with a leaky top, and another man sitting on
a threadbare couch in his basement apartment feeding grapefruit sections to a
woman with pretty eyes.

The three men in the car were moving along a snowy residential street in the
vicinity of Rookery State College while listening to a news bulletin on the
radio--the Soviet Union had sent another cosmonaut into orbit.

The man in the basement, whose name was Neil Novotny, was listening to Peggy
Benoit's life story. With only one spoon between them, they were taking turns
feeding each other. The grapefruit sections had been soaking in wine overnight.

"Then we weren't together a year when he left me," she said with a
bitter little laugh. "He took our television and our hi-fi and half our
wedding silver and some of my jewelry and he drove away in our car, leaving me
without transportation."

"What a jerk," said Neil Novotny, his eyes fastened admiringly on
Peggy, whose hair was a very black shade of black and whose brown Mediterranean
eyes (Spanish? Italian?) were large and penetrating. She had rather large lips,
and he wanted to kiss them. Today she wore a navy pea coat over her green wool
dress. Her earrings were little silver keys. At twenty-nine, Dr. Peggy Benoit
was the bright new star of Rookery State's music department. She directed the
college choir, gave lessons in voice, assisted the band director, and taught a
popular class in Music Appreciation. She was the cousin of a cousin of Neil's,
related to him by marriage, not by blood."

Reviews

Hassler takes leave of the denizens of Staggerford and visits the facinating
magic of his wryly observed insights upon a motley collection of junior
professors at Rookery State College, a sort of puratory for academic misfits
in the remote northwoods of Minnesota... Skillfully skewering academic
intrigue, basic human foibles and the upheavals of the 1960's, Hassler has
produced an uproariously funny, wonderfully satisfying sendup of academic
tomfoolery.

--Pubishers Weekly
May 22, 1995

Tongue firmly in cheek, Hassler cheerfuly sends up student unrest, inane
college bureaucrats, and other academic idiosyncracies both universal and
peculiar to the ‘60s. Remote RookeryState College is the unlikely place
where Neil Novotny, lousy English teacher and mediocre unpublished novelist,
comes upon the idea of starting a jazz quintet. With the help of Peggy Benoit,
Neil's muse and out-of-reach love, he recruits a cast of eccentrics from a
town and state full of same: Leland Edwards, slavishly devoted to his mother
(with whom he still lives), will play the piano -- and a mean piano it is;
Connor, a painter lured away from a Minneapolis private college, plucks the
bass; Peggy plays the clarinet; and Victor Dash the drums. The five make music
against a backdrop of ‘60s shenanigans, as when Victor becomes campus leader
of the Faculty Alliance of America, a neophyte union urging the faculty to
strike (salaries have been frozen for two years). The novel goes on in this
vein: bright, antic, and vivid, with lots of deadpan humor, romantic and
political intrigue, affectionate reversals of fortune. Just when it seems that
Neil will be fired because students arrange their schedules to avoid his class
and because he isn't published, Conner arranges for Emerson Tate, a
Minneapolis critic connected with a small press, to rewrite Neil's novel into
a historical romance. With a supporting cast of characters who almost always
amuse and entertain, Hassler's comic formula remains fresh, even as the
strikes fails and the caravan moves on.

Hassler displays once again why he's the novel's answer to Garrison Keillor.
This may not be Lucky Jim, but it's worthy to be mentioned in the same
breath.

--Kirkus Reviews
May 1, 1995

On a cold day in 1969, faculty members at Minnesota's Rookery State College
form the Icejam Quintet. As musicians,they create exquisite harmonies, but
troubles plague their personal and professional lives. The unlikely combo
includes an alcoholic painter with a chronically depressed wife, an obsessed
novelist who is comically ill prepared for class, an English teacher who
aspires to be a strike organizer, a middle-aged professor still dominated by
his flamboyant mother, and a beautiful vocalist whose ex-husband distributes
her nude photograph to college officials. Many other memorable characters
populate Hassler's ... novel, and he treats even the least attractive with
bemused respect. In several scenes he provides academic comedy as exquisite as
that of Kingsley Amis, but he also examines serious consequences of the war in
Vietnam, adolescent rebellion, and a campus strike. Hassler dramatizes rifts
in freindships, families, and communities but celebrates the values that hold
people together. Highly recommended.